


Patchwork

by Nevanna



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Gen, Mental Instability, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-19 20:47:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5980525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevanna/pseuds/Nevanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Topher's mind is coming apart at the seams, and all that Adelle can do is listen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patchwork

**Author's Note:**

> This story fills the "nervous breakdown" square for the Hurt/Comfort Bingo amnesty period. As the prompt and the tags imply, it focuses directly upon Topher's mental state during the "Epitaph" episodes, so if that is the type of thing you'd prefer not to read, this author understands and respects that completely.

It’s difficult to know, with any certainty, what will upset Topher to the point of incoherency. Sometimes it’s the face of a former Active, and sometimes it’s a comment, a question, a prayer, from one of the many strays who have found their way into the Dollhouse. He is comforted and tormented in equal measure by the books that lie in stacks around the sleeping pod that he’s claimed as his own. Adelle has watched his face as he perused everything from thick neuroscience tomes to Greek mythology to children’s stories. She’s tried to find a pattern, a map, as Topher himself might have done once.

Of course, some of his triggers are easier to understand than others.

 _"'…I must take care to give the girl just the right quantity of the right sorts of brains,'"_ he reads aloud. _"'I want her to know just enough, but not too much.'"_

Adelle seats herself at the edge of the pod, like a child dangling her feet in a stream. “Is that so?”

Topher shows her the cover of his book: _The Patchwork Girl of Oz._ Somebody must have brought it in from the outside. “They designed her to be a servant, but there were too many things measured and mixed in her head. It wasn’t an accident.” He flips a few pages, and looks up at Adelle again. _“It wasn’t an accident,”_ he repeats, his eyes darting this way and that.

She rubs his shoulder gently, and says, “I’m here,” because it’s the only honest thing that she can tell him. 

Perhaps, when Topher says, “her,” he’s thinking of Echo, or Whiskey, or Bennett Halverson, or simply of a character in a book instead of somebody real (as if either of them is qualified to determine what makes a person “real”). Adelle isn’t familiar with this particular Oz story, although she can remember being faintly amused that her employees viewed her as the Wicked Witch of the West, and even more amused that they thought it was a secret. 

“We made patchwork girls,” Topher says.

“We did,” Adelle agrees. Girls and boys with their brains perfectly measured and mixed to be servants, or spies, or sexual playthings. She had needed a programmer who would create whatever and whomever was asked of him, without judgment or hesitation. The first thing that she understood about Topher was that his brain was, in its way, as perfectly designed for his role as theirs were.

Or so she once believed.

“When did everything go wrong?” Topher demands. “Was it when they put extra things in her head, or brought her out into the world? I keep trying to find the miscalculation, the flaw in the programming, I keep trying, I keep trying…” He rocks back and forth in place.

“Would you like to give me this, darling?” Adelle eases the book out of his hands. He doesn’t resist. “We can find you something else to read.”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs, and it reminds her of everything that he once tossed off his shoulders. “Could you just sit here with me for a while?”

Topher has asked this before, and it’s at once the easiest and the most difficult of his requests, because to fulfill it is to watch the stitches holding his mind together come loose, little by little. The worst of it, by far, is that Adelle believes that _he_ can feel them coming loose, too.

She takes his hand in both of hers. “Of course I will.”

**Author's Note:**

> In the seventh book in L. Frank Baum's Oz series, before the titular Patchwork Girl is brought to life, her creators mix up magical compounds to form her personality. Their guest, the hero of the story, recognizes that her mind will be limited and feels sorry for her, and so he sneaks in other traits, such as "cleverness," "judgment," and "self reliance" while everybody else is distracted.
> 
> When I thought back to her introduction recently, I could see how Topher's work was similar.


End file.
